Expose, Oppose, Propose: Alternative Policy Groups and the Struggle for Global Justice
By William K. Carroll

Since the 1970s, economic globalization has fuelled concerns that democracy is being hollowed out. Transnational social movements have developed as advocates of a “democratic globalization” that enriches human relations across space by empowering communities and citizens to participate in the full range of decisions that shape and govern their lives. Alongside and in support of these movements, transnational alternative policy groups (TAPGs) have emerged: think tanks that provide evidence-based critiques of neoliberal capitalism while promoting democratic alternatives to the corporate agenda of top-down globalization.

Democracy is in crisis, from the streets of Ferguson to the struggle in Greece. Throughout the world millions suffer under neo-liberalism and austerity but are unable to force their governments to address their needs. Fundamentally, democracy is about the relationships between the state, markets and civil society. Attempts to artificially repress the functions of any of these institutions result in political, social and economic problems that lead to irresolvable contradictions and eventual failure. This book undertakes the examination of capitalist democracy, globalization, and the emergence of a transnational capitalist class needed to develop a strategy for implementing democracy beyond its current impasse.

This exciting new study provides an original and provocative exposé of the crisis of global capitalism in its multiple dimensions – economic, political, social, ecological, military, and cultural. Building on his earlier works on globalization, William I. Robinson discusses the nature of the new global capitalism, the rise of a globalized production and financial system, a transnational capitalist class, and a transnational state and warns of the rise of a global police state to contain the explosive contradictions of a global capitalist system that is crisis-ridden and out of control. Robinson concludes with an exploration of how diverse social and political forces are responding to the crisis and alternative scenarios for the future.

The global capitalism perspective is a unique research program focused on understanding relatively recent developments in worldwide social, economic, and political practices related to globalization. At its core, it seeks to contextualize the rearticulation of nation-states and broad geographic regions into highly interdependent networks of production and distribution, and in so doing explain consequent changes in social relations within and between countries in the contemporary era. The present volume contributes to this effort by focusing on social class formation across borders via the processes and actors that make globalized capitalism possible.

The essays presented here offer a wide range of emphases in terms of the particular lenses and evidence they use. They cover such topics as the emergence of a transnational capitalist class-based fascist regime responding to the structural crises of global capitalism as well as the links between global class formation and the US racial project as it relates to electoral politics and demographic changes in the US South.

Globalization and Transnational Capitalism in Asia and Oceania
Edited By Jeb Sprague

News headlines warn of rivalries and competing nations across Asia and the Pacific, even as powerful new cross-border relations form as never before. This book looks behind the Asia-Pacific curtain: at the new forms of social, economic, and political integration taking place through a global capitalism that is rife with contradictions, inequality, and crisis. We are moved beyond traditional conceptualizations of the inter-state system with its nation-state competition as the core organizing principle of world capitalism and the principal institutional framework that shapes the makeup of global social forces.

These important studies examine and debate over how there is a growing transnationality of material (economic) relations in the global era, as well as an emerging transnationality of many social and class relations. How does transnational capitalist class fractions, new middle strata, and labor undergird globalization in Asia and Oceania? How have states and institutions become entwined with such processes? This book provides insight into a field of dynamic change.

Capitalist Networks And Social Power in Australia and New Zealand
By Georgina Murray

It is often asserted that the ruling elite in Western capitalist economies now consists of liberal intellectuals and their media sympathisers. By contrast, this book looks at the real elite in Australian and New Zealand society and shows that there is still a ruling class based upon economic dominance. From an analysis of corporate and public records, interviews, and other primary and secondary data, it develops a picture of networks of power that are changing but are as real as any network in the past.

Critical Globalization Studies is the first volume to map out a critical approach to the rapidly growing field of gloablization studies. Centrally concerned with global justice, the contributors both scrutinze and recast the subject. As well, the volume serves as a bridge connecting scholars of globalization, the policy world, and the global justice movement. The essays examine a wide range of topics too often left at the margin of globalization studies and in the process raise a host of crucial questions. Unique in its extensive and comprehensive approach, Critical Globalization Studies develops new and important theoretical perspectives on globalization while engaging global social activism. It is an indispenseable guide for both academics and practitioners.

The Dialectics of Globalization: Economic and Political Conflict in a Transnational World
By Jerry Harris

This book challenges the common view that nation states still define international relations, with the United States as hegemonic leader of the world system. Instead Harris offers a more complex analysis of world affairs that sees the current period as one of transition between nationally based industrial capitalism and a global system based on revolutionary methods of production and new class relationships. He argues this conflict appears in every country as national economies realigned to fit new patterns of world accumulation creating a host of political tensions within and between nations.

Financial Elites and Transnational Business: Who Rules the World?
Edited by Georgina Murra and John Scott

This absorbing book addresses the seemingly simple question of who rules the world by linking it to debates about who owns the world and what this means for the dynamics of global power distribution.Several expert contributors focus on global issues, including the role of transnational finance, interlocking directorates, ownership and tax havens. Others examine how these issues at the global level interact with the regional or nation state level in the US, the UK, China, Australia and Mexico. The book scrutinizes globalization from a fresh, holistic perspective, examining the relationship between the national and transnational to uncover the most significant structures and agents of power. Possible policy futures are also considered.Contributors: W.K. Carroll, B. Cronin, F.-X. Dudouet, E. Gremont, J. Harris, G. Murray, D. Peetz, A. Salas-Porras, J. Scott, C.L. Staples, A. van Fossen, A. Vion.

Widely adopted throughout the world, this definitive text comprehensively examines how the global economy works and its effects on people and places. Peter Dicken provides a balanced yet critical analysis of globalization processes and debates. The text synthesizes a wealth of data on production, distribution, consumption, and innovation, including detailed case studies of key global industries. Students learn how the global economic map is being shaped and reshaped by dynamic interactions among transnational corporations, states, consumers, labor, and civil society organizations. Useful features include nearly 250 quick-reference figures and tables. The companion website offers PowerPoint slides of the figures and tables, additional case studies and questions, annotated Web links, and more.

Deftly combining nuanced theory with rich empirical examples, leading scholar Valentine M. Moghadam focuses especially on three transnational social movements-Islamism, feminism, and global justice. Defining globalization as a complex process in which the mobility of capital, peoples, organizations, movements, and ideas takes on an increasingly transnational form, the author shows how both physical and electronic mobility has helped to create dynamic global social movements. Globalization has engendered the spread of neoliberal capitalism across the world, but it also has engendered opposition and collective action.

In this book, based on his highly successful Sociology of the Global System, Leslie Sklair focuses on alternatives to global capitalism, arguing strongly that there are other alternative futures that retain and encourage the positive aspects of globalization whilst identifying what is wrong with capitalism. The book will continue to offer a concise and illuminating treatment of globalization for all students and academics in understanding how the global system works.

In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Information Technology Industry
Edited by Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi

While much has been written on the growth of information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services in India, little is known about the people who work in these industries, about the nature of the work itself, and about its wider social and cultural ramifications. The papers in this collection combine empirical research with theoretical insight to fill this gap and explore questions about the trajectory of globalization in India. The themes covered include: (a) sourcing and social structuring of the new global workforce; (b) the work process, work culture, regimes of control and resistance in IT-enabled industries; (c) work, culture and identity; (d) nations, borders and cross-border flows.

Indian Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley: The Making of a Transnational Techno-Capitalist ClassBy Monica R. Biradavolu

This innovative study examines the emergence and growing power of a new group of immigrant Indians to the United States: the transnational techno-capitalist class of entrepreneurs operating at the upper echelons of the hi-tech industry in Silicon Valley and Bangalore. Imbibing the culture of innovation and entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley, recognizing the importance of building strong networks, and relying upon their educational qualifications, professional credentials and powerful yet invisible family support, Indians are playing a central role in redefining what it means to be an ‘immigrant entrepreneur’ from a ‘developing country’. These powerful actors are negotiating on their own terms and forging their own transnational space in the global software industry to become a transnational capitalist class, with allegiance to global capitalism and a political project of pushing the ideas and ideals of capitalism in both their ‘home’ and ‘adopted’ countries. This an important book for those in ethnic and immigrant studies.

Karl Marx, part of the Library of World Biography Series, is aimed primarily at undergraduates with little or no background knowledge of Marx or his theories. This book covers the important aspects of his life and the major theoretical arguments of his work. It also explores the Industrial Revolution through the lens of Marx’s view of socialism, not simply as an ethical idea but also as a way of framing the industrial system and its impact on workers.

This ambitious volume chronicles and analyzes from a critical globalization perspective the social, economic, and political changes sweeping across Latin America from the 1970s through the present day. Sociologist William I. Robinson summarizes his theory of globalization and discusses how Latin America’s political economy has changed as the states integrate into the new global production and financial system, focusing specifically on the rise of nontraditional agricultural exports, the explosion of maquiladoras, transnational tourism, and the export of labor and the import of remittances. He follows with an overview of the clash among global capitalist forces, neoliberalism, and the new left in Latin America, looking closely at the challenges and dilemmas resistance movements face and their prospects for success.

The Making of a Transnational Capitalist Class: Corporate Power in the 21st CenturyBy William K. Carroll

Carroll provides an in-depth analysis that spans the three decades of the late 20th and early 21st century, when capitalist globalization attained unprecedented momentum, propelled both by the transnationalization of accumulation and by the political paradigm of transnational neoliberalism. This has been an era in which national governments have deregulated capital, international institutions such as the World Trade Organization and the World Economic Forum have gained prominence, and production and finance have become more fully transnational, increasing the structural power of capital over communities and workers.

Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the WorldBy Robyn Magalit Rodriguez

Robyn Magalit Rodriguez investigates how and why the Philippine government transformed itself into what she calls a labor brokerage state, which actively prepares, mobilizes, and regulates its citizens for migrant work abroad. Filipino men and women fill a range of jobs around the globe, including domestic work, construction, and engineering, and they have even worked in the Middle East to support U.S. military operations. At the same time, the state redefines nationalism to normalize its citizens to migration while fostering their ties to the Philippines. Those who leave the country to work and send their wages to their families at home are treated as new national heroes.

Drawing on ethnographic research of the Philippine government’s migration bureaucracy, interviews, and archival work, Rodriguez presents a new analysis of neoliberal globalization and its consequences for nation-state formation.

The Nation in the Global Era: Conflict and TransformationEdited by Jerry Harris

The Nation in the Global Era: Conflict and Transformation includes papers presented at the 2008 GSA North American Conference held at Pace University in New York City. This volume offers unique perspectives into a range of important current topics for both activists and scholars concerned with globalization. The articles combine the study of globalization as an integrated world system with the specifics of how individual nations and groups are inserted into the larger economic, social, cultural and political patterns. This essential approach seeks out those forces that create a shared world system, yet understands the multiple levels and variances under which that system develops.

Globalization, Sovereignty and Citizenship in the CaribbeanBy Hilbourne Watson

Author Hilbourne Watson addresses the role of the transnational capitalist class in the Caribbean region.

The contributors to Globalization, Sovereignty and Citizenship in the Caribbean variously address topics and issues of colonial and postcolonial citizenship, identity and belonging; sovereignty and the body politic, and unresolved class and other contradictions of the Haitian Revolution, Commonwealth Caribbean societies, Cuba, and the non-independent territories of Puerto Rico and the Netherlands Antilles, the French Antilles, and the Cayman Islands. There are degrees of emphasis on the contradictory relationship between globalization and national processes, with attention to class, state, nation, gender, racialization, culture, migrant labour and other political concerns. The deepening of the integration of the entire Caribbean into the contradictory processes of globalization suggests that sovereignty, democracy, citizenship, belonging and identity as experienced in the region are best theorized as unfinished (open-ended) projects

How have immigrants, who grew up in a state-controlled communist system, learned to become so adept at starting businesses in the North American market economy? This book follows the emergence of successful cosmopolitan entrepreneurs after the collapse of the former Soviet Union. Through an analysis of interview data and biographies of entrepreneurs, Dr. Alexander Shvarts uncovers five diverse paths to self-employment for Russian immigrants, which are shaped by transitional economy, ethnic and class dimensions of entrepreneurship, and transnationalism.

Synthesizing extensive research on transnational activism, Social Movements for Global Democracy shows how transnational networks of social movement activists—democratic globalizers—have worked to promote human rights and ecological sustainability over the predominant neoliberal system of economic integration.Using case studies of recent and ongoing campaigns for global justice, Jackie Smith provides valuable insight into whether and how these activists are succeeding. She argues that democratic globalizers could be more effective if they presented a united front organized around a global vision that places human rights and ecological stability foremost and if they were to directly engage governments and the United Nations.

Statecraft, Welfare and the Politics of InclusionBy Kanishka Jayasuriya

Jayasuriya explores the dynamics of a new social agenda conceived within the boundaries of neo liberalism. The enhanced focus on issues such as poverty through strategies of inclusion frames new terms of engagement for social policy, different from that which existed in the terrain of the post war welfare state. The author argues that this represents a form of neo liberal sociability built around a diverse complex of welfare reform extending from the advanced industrial states to East Asia, all of which creates a new social contract within a market model.

A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational WorldBy William I. Robinson

In this book, sociologist William I. Robinson offers a theory of globalization that follows the rise of a new capitalist class and a transnational state. Growing beyond national boundaries, this new class comprises a global system in which Japanese capitalists are just as comfortable investing in Latin America as North Americans are in Southeast Asia. Their development of global, interconnected industries and businesses make them drivers of world capitalism.

Anchored in contemporary debates on capitalism and political economy, this study reconsiders the major trends which are currently shaping a new stage of capitalism. With chapters examining globalization, the role of technology and environmental degradation, George Liodakis constructsm a politico-economic approach on contemporary capitalism from within a classical Marxist framework of political economy. The volume provides a fitting balance between theory and empirical evidence and significantly enriches the existing scholarship on contemporary capitalism and the potential for social change. This is an important contribution to those interested in international political economy, in particular with developing a new political strategy for going beyond capitalism: a ‘reinvention’ of a communist perspective.

The Transnational Capitalist Classprovides theoretically informed empirical research to explain the process of globalization from the viewpoint of the corporations themselves. Through personal interviews with executives and managers from over eighty Fortune Global 500 corporations, Sklair demonstrates how globalization works from the perspective of those who control and oppose the major globalizing corporations and their allies in government and the media. Sklair’s unique approach brings a fresh perspective to what has become a key debate of our time.

An exciting and original analysis of the development of capitalist classes, such as the Freemasons, that cross national boundaries in the global political economy. This innovative book focuses on: an historical perspective on class formation under capitalism and its transnational integration; and international relations between the English-speaking centre of capital and successive contender states. The author develops a broad-ranging and thorough understanding of class in the process of globalization. He does so within several theoretical frameworks shedding much light on this important topic.

In this timely and provocative study, William I. Robinson challenges received wisdom on Central America. He starts with an exposition on the new global capitalism. Then, drawing on a wide range of historical documentation, interviews, and social science research, he proceeds to show how capitalist globalization has thoroughly transformed the region, disrupting the conventional pattern of revolutionary upheaval, civil wars, and pacification, and ushering in instead a new transnational model of economy and society.

Transnational capitalism and the struggle over European Integration
By Bastiaan van Apeldoorn

This book presents an analysis of the transnational social forces in the making of a new European socio-economic order that emerged out of the European integration process during the 1980s and 1990s. Arguing that the political economy of European integration must be put within the context of a changing global capitalism, Van Apeldoorn examines how European change is linked to global change and how transnational actors mediate these changes